End of Free Electricity? New Settlement Rules for Companies from July
July 2025 is a date that every business owner in Wrocław and surroundings should mark in red on the calendar. Shielding programs are ending, and hard market rules are entering, which can raise your monthly electricity expenses by over 34.2%. Without unnecessary talk — it's time to check what will realistically change in your energy invoices.
Farewell to the maximum price of 693 PLN per MWh
Since September 2022, many companies in Poland have benefited from state protection. The electricity price was frozen at 693 PLN per megawatt-hour (plus VAT and excise). This gave some peace of mind, but this umbrella is just folding up. According to the new guidelines, from July 1, 2025, most medium enterprises will switch to settlements based directly on quotations on the Polish Power Exchange. For a company that consumes 147 MWh annually, this means an increase in costs of about 2,340 PLN per month if they don't change their purchasing strategy.
At EKO-Efekt Consulting, we analyzed the invoices of 483 of our clients from the last quarter. The conclusion is simple: only 14.3% of them are ready for the return to full market rates. The rest risk that the margin from their products will simply evaporate to pay the bills. We check facts, not promises — energy suppliers are already sending annexes that look beneficial but in reality bind hands for the next 23 months at very high base rates.
We count every kilowatt-hour because from July each of them will cost nearly one-third more than currently.
Dynamic prices – a trap or an opportunity?
The novelty that causes the most emotion is dynamic tariffs. This is a system where the electricity price changes every hour. If your company works mainly in the morning, between 7:14 AM and 10:00 AM, you can pay even twice as much as a competitor who starts machines at noon when photovoltaics produce the most electricity and the price on the exchange drops. This is not theory — in May 2024 we already had days when the electricity price at noon was negative and in the evening jumped to 840 PLN per MWh.
For a bakery or a production plant that cannot shift working hours, this sounds like a sentence. But for companies with energy storage or a flexible schedule, this is a chance for huge savings. Our team in Wrocław calculated that smart management of electricity consumption allows lowering the average unit price by 18.6% on a monthly scale. This requires, however, mounting appropriate meters and monitoring systems, which usually takes us about 11 business days from signing the order.
Capacity fee and how not to overpay it
Most entrepreneurs focus on the price per kilowatt-hour but forget about the capacity fee. This is a tax for the fact that the energy system must be ready to deliver electricity to you at any moment. From July 2025, the rules for calculating this fee become even more restrictive. If your power consumption is uneven and you have large consumption jumps, you will pay the most. In 2024, the average rate is about 126.10 PLN for every MWh consumed during peak hours (business days 7:00 AM – 9:59 PM).
We have a concrete example from last month. A carpentry workshop near Wrocław was paying 3,450 PLN in capacity fee alone. After installing a simple reactive power compensation system and shifting the charging of two forklifts to night hours, this amount dropped to 1,128 PLN. Ecology is simply pure profit, and in this case, the profit amounted to over 2,300 PLN per month with an investment that paid back in 3.2 months. Don't wait until July, because then the queues for installers will reach autumn.
The capacity fee is the silent killer of profitability in Polish industry. However, it can be legally lowered by more than half.
ESG is not just a fashion, it's access to cheaper money
You might have heard about ESG reporting and think it only concerns big corporations. Nothing could be further from the truth. From 2025, banks will check the so-called carbon footprint of every company applying for a working capital loan or leasing even more carefully. According to our data, 94.6% of large financial institutions in Poland have already introduced internal penalty points for the lack of a decarbonization strategy. If your company does not show that it is trying to limit energy consumption, the interest rate on your loan can be higher by 1.4 percentage points.
